Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

As he writes all this, at his desk in the sharp torchlight, he sees himself as that squatted Lucheni in the vortex of time, waiting for Joy, his sin, to come and rescue him from his sins. He craves her perfume, the weight on his neck of the fur coat her wealthy Jewish husband has bought her; he waits for her.

In the next letter, under torchlight, he offers to come to California to be with her, and build a glass house overlooking the ocean, a house with a seamless steel frame and liquid walls. All she needs to do is say yes and he will leave everything and be there.

Joy never gets this letter, or at least he assumes so, because her reply does not acknowledge it. She tells him about an argument she has had with her husband and how a barbecued lobster ended up in the swimming pool. She ends by instructing, knight E5 to F3. Perhaps, he concludes, his letter was dropped into the mid-Atlantic by mistake.

He wakes with the idea that Helen is downstairs, and then realises that he is not in bed but at the kitchen table clutching a pen. The residue of a dream plays and replays an image of Alice appearing in sunlight from a bus. Always dreaming of Alice, always seeing her beauty through the haze of recent sleep. He stands from the table.

“Helen?”

There is nobody in the kitchen except the dog, who comes to him and presses herself against his leg. He pats her back heavily and goes to the living room, also empty. He finds, without knowing how, that D's letters are in his hand as if an extension to his own fingers. The envelopes are filthy, crumpled, but give out a certain heat and reassurance.

“Helen?”

He checks in the study. He is not at all sure if he really expects to find her; something tells him she is definitely not here and that she is dead. Dead of a stroke, they say, whatever that is. But dead? Does this mean she can't be here? What does it mean? Surely she is here, she has always been here. You were not faithful, he thinks with some relief — our score is not settled, and so you cannot be gone. We need to both be here so we can start again.

He holds the letters to his stomach and goes from room to room. He gets lost, he picks his way back. Perhaps she is with Henry, stroking the child's hand and hair as she whispers, Sshhh bubba, sshhh. He thinks now of Henry, coddled by Helen, always loved in her arms or on her lap, having stories, cooking, their hair catching sunlight. Henry is the daughter and the son in one. Unreachable by the law or by the general filth of systems. Helen will save her child from systems. They look at art books, cookbooks, and Bibles. He calls her mumma, she calls him bubba, and with those downy words they draw the world around them.

He makes a breakfast of toast and butter, curious as to why there seems to be no light outside yet. Maybe it's — the late season. The late season is so often dark.

Then, by the living room's unlit fire, he sits and eats, and lets the television flicker in the background. He recalls a letter burning in the grate and a hundred fat-soaked newspapers, salt and vinegar on his fingers. Monkey goes to space. Israel does a thing. Egypt. If he waits here, the dog's head balanced on his leg and her black body curled out across the carpet like a contorted shadow of himself, Helen will possibly come.

He draws his knees to his chest and crosses his ankles, a difficult position for a man of his size but he finds balance on his sitting bones and roots himself to the ground. He has no headache. Life seems closer: somehow his mother seems closer. His shoes are on, and a pair of trousers and his coat. This surprises him. He closes his eyes and an image of himself comes, kneeling over the human-skin Bible. Outside Helen wavers on the ladder in her pinafore as he turns to Psalms and reads. Shall thy wonders be known in the dark? And thy righteousness in the land of forgetfulness? The emotion of it is so pressing, yielding the feeling of something terribly lost and lost over again, that he squeezes his eyes tighter. The memory is clear and godly, so clear that it barely has the quality of a memory at all, but more that of — what is it? The feeling that one has been here before, and that time spirals rather than flows. He has been here before, he thinks. He will be here again.

His mother is close. Is she dead? Alive? Dead. He is certain he remembers her dying, and the recollection is peaceful and fightless, almost as if she did not die at all but just moved rest-fully from one sitting position to another. She told him a story, then or some other time, about milk. About how there were once children who were born and were perfectly healthy until they drank their mother's milk, but in that milk was a disease that damaged their brains, and they kept drinking and kept drinking the very stuff that gave them life, and all the time it was taking their lives. Until they were blank and empty. Until their pale skin was a shore of washed-up milk.

Why would she tell him this story? He wonders if it relates to the woman and child in the woods. Or if it relates to nothing, just another unexplained story that she told as she always did, as if she were forever showing him grains of sand but never showing him the beach.

Then other images play: a flock of coloured birds flying up into a pyramid of glass (surely not a memory, more likely a dream). A brown car passing like silk along an American highway. Quail Woods being cut down, the trees massive to his small child's mind. Alice in a blue dress with a large felt raspberry that Helen had sewn onto the front and Henry running in the garden after a plastic plane. Sara pouring endless streams of coffee as if to substitute for affection, her large white hands handing him a cup, handing it over, handing it over like birds in flight. Now those brain-damaged children again; how he feels for them, and how sick he feels to think of them at the breast dying piece by piece.

Then his wife comes to him in a form she has so often come to him. It is a fantasy. She is wearing a miniskirt, that miniskirt that he so well remembers with the red stitching on denim and the small pockets that were good for nothing. He had always imagined that it was theirs, not hers. It was something they might take from the cupboard some rainy afternoons, use for the duration of lovemaking, and put away again. An erotic agreement between them.

He is still surprised by how unsophisticated this fantasy is, and how the more elementary it is the more arousing. His fantasy requires that she is naked from the waist up, dressed only in the skirt, her hair plain, and her eyelids tinged yellow, and her head directed to the centre of the living room, resting on the human-skin Bible. The room is empty and featureless, the fire out, a cup of water near to them that they never touch. There is no before or after, no baby, no milk, just that lone unmitigated act.

The wrecking ball buckled the face of a house. Along the Edwardian terrace other houses were being pulled down with hydraulic excavators and cranes; they could not demolish them fast enough. It was a bleak scene — the buildings' masonry twisted and their brickwork crumbled, and the house interiors were black, rotten, and forgotten. The snow around them was dirty and the air dusty. He covered his face.

Hardly old at all, these buildings, but not worth living in as they stood, and too expensive to restore. They were not war-damaged themselves, but they reminded one of war damage, reminiscent of that starless, hungry time of his teens and towns that looked beaten up and sick. No, the sooner the rows were gone the better — their poor condition did nothing for the area except cast an austere shadow, and the ground they occupied was relatively high and drained, close to the steelworks. It would provide a good housing site for the influx of workers. He was wondering at a clean modern development based on the big ideas of the thirties; when he talked about humanity, comfort, and provision Helen approved. Yes, she said, that's better, that's good.